Europeans All Closely Related, Gene Study Shows

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Europeans all shared a common ancestor just 1,000 years ago, new
genetic research reveals.

Scientists drew this conclusion, detailed today (May 7) in the
journal PLOS Biology, by calculating the length of regions of
shared DNA from 2,000 Europeans.

The same technique hasn't been applied to other continents, but
people in other parts of the world are just as likely to be
closely related, the researchers said.

"In fact, it's likely that everyone in the world is related over
just the past few thousand years," said study co-author Graham
Coop, a geneticist at the University of California, Davis.
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All in the family

For more than a decade, researchers calculated theoretically that
all people shared common ancestors fairly recently.

To test that theory, Coop and his colleagues analyzed 500,000
spots on the genome of Europeans, from Turkey to the United
Kingdom. To untangle
European ancestry, they calculated the length of shared
segments of DNA, or the molecules that contain the genetic
instructions for life. When two people share a longer stretch of
identical DNA, they are likely to share a more recent common
ancestor, since over time those gene segments evolve and
diversify.

The researchers found that all Europeans shared a common ancestor
just 1,000 years ago.

There were also some regional surprises.

For instance, Italians are slightly less related to one another
than people from other European countries are to one another,
perhaps because Italians have had a large, fairly stable
population for a few thousand years.

In addition, people from the United Kingdom are more related to
people from Ireland than they are to other people from the United
Kingdom. That's possibly because many people have migrated from
the smaller country of Ireland to the bigger United Kingdom in
the past several hundred years, Coop told LiveScience.

The researchers also showed that people in Eastern Europe were
slightly more related to each other than were those in Western
Europe.

Recent history

That may be he signature of Slavic expansion and migrations, such
as those of the Huns and the Goths, about 1,000 years ago, said
John Novembre, a population geneticist at the University of
Chicago, who was not involved in the study.

The new findings are exciting because they allow researchers to
trace much more recent
human history.

"In the past human geneticists have been able to focus on the
types of population movement that have taken place over tens of
thousands of years — like moving out
of Africa and into Eurasia," Novembre told LiveScience.
"They're starting to see population movements that have taken
place in the middle ages."